Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Similar to what Darksend did for bears, I've done some analysis on what the single best non-tier piece is to get for the 5 tier-piece slots.

The TL;DR answer is: the gloves. Specifically the heroic Aldriana's Gloves of Secrecy, which drop from Rotface. That's the optimal choice - but there are other decisions you face. More of those at the end.

This is all based on the heroic levels of gearing. That's the long haul. In the short haul things aren't so different, honestly, but you might as well invest in what you're going to hope is the best of the best, right? Thought so :)

The difference between the T10 and the entrails is (in favor of the T10) 29 agi, 72 stam, 114 crit and 6 arpen at the cost of 34 ap and 92 haste. That's a clear win.

The difference between the T10 and the Geistlord is 24 agi, 106 arpen at the cost of 48 ap, 8 crit and 98 hit. Another big win for T10; arpen beats hit, and you're not hurting for that much hit most of the time.

T10 chest vs Sack of Wonder: 16 agi, 122 crit, 106 arpen vs 16 AP, 114 hit and 106 expertise, and an extra blue socket. This is close, but arpen and crit are more valuable than hit and expertise, even with that additional socket. Still, consider this if you're gearing up your cat and bear; you can use this as a double duty piece and be pretty happy.

T10 legs vs Gangrenous Leggings: 16 agi, 122 arpen, 106 expertise vs 16 ap, 122 crit and 98 hit and a blue socket. This normally would go to the Gangrenous, save that hit is a lot easier to get than expertise and arpen beats the hell out of crit. The socket is awful tempting though.

So the answer is the gloves, right? Well...maybe. If you're gearing for bears and cats, it might be a better choice to go with the chest instead. The difference between the T10 gloves and the offtier piece is really fairly small (8 agi/haste vs a socket), but the cost in badges is much greater for the chest. Plus, having the chest means you have the best in slot for a bear AND close to the best for a cat, depending on your hit/expertise levels. The disadvantage there is that just with the T10 legs and the Sack of Wonder, you're going to be over the expertise cap by 80 points! Ugh. And since you desperately want 4pT10, going with an offtier piece in the legs isn't an option.

Plus, honestly - you're going to have hit around too, so it doesn't do as well for you.

Still - if you have to make a choice for gearing up both, that's not a bad one. Another option is to try and make the chest and gloves your 'shared' pieces, which means your offtier can be one of head, legs and shoulders. Given the expense and the relative difference in value, I'd probably go with the Gangrenous legs as my offset piece in that situation for one spec and possibly the Geistlord punishment sack for the other. That means you'd be buying two sets of shoulders, one leg and one head, which isn't so bad at the end of the day.

As always - make an informed choice based on your gearing values right now. If you know you're not going to ever do heroic 25-man or get a token, that may change things significantly. Don't not get upgrades in slots just because you'll get rid of them at some point too; even if you spend your emblems of frost on nothing but tier pieces, you're still looking at about 8 weeks before you can get 4 of your 5 pieces. This assumes that you're spending 65 on the shoulders and hands and 90 on the legs and head - it's actually more for a cat if you're going for the chest (345, to be precise). Assuming you've done every heroic daily, the raid weekly, and run 10-man and 25-man content and have done the new quests, you're looking at 41+35+35+35 = 146 badges when the next gate is unlocked. Assuming that's three weeks with three new bosses, you're looking at a weekly gain of (5+14+14+14) = 47 badges, or another 141 over those three weeks. Assuming another 3 bosses come out for three weeks after that, you're looking at (5+14+20+20) = 59 badges for those three weeks, or 177.

Or another way to put it: if you do everything - you'll get 4 pieces including the expensive ones at the end of the 8th week.

So...don't splurge on other bits. Don't get the offtier pieces that are available. Don't buy primordial saronite. Unless, of course, you can wait for all this - then you should gouge suckers trying to get their shadowmourne. :)

19 comments:

Copey
said...

Gouge suckers? Talked me RIGHT into it. With the way badges are flowing out of multiple orifices over here...I’m pretty excited about just how much money I can make while still gearing up at a slightly slower pace. Knowing my guild I can probably take my time since I’m already one of the top geared people.

Nice post, interesting to see how the gearing is on heroic items and this seems to back what I'm seeing with 25man normal gearing.

I've only done a gear set for 10/25man normal mode (not sure I'll be seeing much heroic ICC) and it's close, but it appears that before you get to heroic 25 gear, the off set helm looked like the better choice (gloves were 2nd).

This seems to sync with your analysis, as there doesn't appear to be a 277 offset helm to compete with 277 t10, so it would default to gloves then since again they seemed to be 2nd best offset item at the 264 range.

Yeah, Xeldumont - that's the big elephant in the room. What's the best piece before LK, and what does he drop? My guess is that he'll drop weapons (almost all end bosses do) along with tier tokens and then possibly a chest piece or a piece of jewelry, given that the jewelry is kinda meh.

Once again thanks Kalon. I came to the same conclusion regarding which slots to go tier pieces. Although it is going to be tough to hold out and not spend badges on a few non-tier items. The badge cloak would be a substantial upgrade for me. I'm still sporting the cloak from KT.

The rough part for me is that I hate sharing pieces between bear and cat sets because generally the gemming and enchanting is different. I'm somewhat of a min-maxer so it makes me twitch.

T10 is the first tier set I've seen in a long time that was really beneficial to both cats and bears. Which means for me at that I'll be collecting at least 6 to 8 tier pieces. I dps in 25s and tank in 10s.

One small comment, there are only 2 bosses AFAIK (princes and blood queen) so gate 3 is 55 badges a week not 59.

I went with a 2 week estimate for gates 2 and 3

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If you do the 3 new instances, a random daily every day, the weekly every week, and all 4 bosses of 10 and 25 man, you will have 146 badges when the new gate is opened.

If you clear through Putricide in 10 and 25 that is an additional 47 per week. That is 240 by the time the second gate opens if it takes 2 weeks. If the last gate opens 2 weeks after that, you can have a max of 350 badges.

It will probably take 3 weeks for each gate so realistically you can have your full 4 pc set, idol, cape, and trinket by the time you get to Sindragosa, or 452 emblems if the 3 week estimate holds.

Have you checked the leatherworking leggings from Ashen Verdict rep? They have 3 sockets. 100ArPen and crit rating. Even though they are 264 they might be better then the 277 items and would give you a much bigger boost to dps over the set legs compared to the set gloves.

Daybloom - the crafted legs have 21 less agi, 21 less stam, 44 less AP, 22 less arpen, and trade 92 crit for 106 expertise. The only advantage is the socket, which isn't worth 21 agi much less all the rest. Rawr rates them as the best piece of 264-gear, which I'd agree with if you're fine with expertise somehow. If you're not, this might hurt you quite a bit.

Darksend, you're right - I messed that up. Still going to be at least 8 weeks, and likely longer. Ugh. I don't think it'll be 2 weeks; I think the limited attempts BS will be for at least 3. I could see the crimson wing being 2 though.

After the Plagueworks is available, you will then wait less than 28 days for the next wing to become active. The extended length of the initial 28 day delay is simply due to the timing of the Holidays.

In other news, the initial number of attempts to defeat the major bosses at the end of each wing of Icecrown Citadel has been increased by 5. This means you’ll have 10 attempts for Professor Putricide, 15 attempts when The Crimson Halls are available, then 20 when the Frostwing Halls becomes attackable.

Guess I don't see anything specifically mentioning a timeline. They may want to push it sooner, I suppose, but my gut feeling says that they want to wait as long as they can and milk the tension and waiting for a while.

Though...gods, remember when Ulduar was first released and how long it took to just clear through XT on the first week? I know the servers were hosed, but at the same time people were thrilled that they could get through FL with only a wipe or two. What happened to that difficulty level?

Anyway, it doesn't really matter; even if they release the bosses in a two-week period it'll still take quite a while before you have extra badges for saronite. At least 4 tier pieces, the cloak, possibly the trinket and the idol...I can't remember a time when so little of the gear I want actually comes from an instance save perhaps SSC/TK.

Does the "Get 4T10 first for both bear and cat" approach apply if your only going to be doing normal 10 man ICC's?We're a very casual guild with a few motivated players and are unlikely to be doing very many heroic modes.I got all the offset pieces from Triumph badges to tank with first as they are higher iLevel and am now starting to grab T9 pieces for my cat set.Again, the offset Frost badge pieces are higher iLevel, so it makes me wonder if the same approach would be the best still...

Alcowhorlick - If you're only going to be doing 10-mans, I'd try to get the 4-piece for cats but likely not bears. The 4-piece by itself is like a 6% DPS increase, and that's too hard to ignore even with higher ilvls. The two-piece bonus is nice but not insane. It really depends on when you think you'd get enough badges, but in general 4 pieces of T10 is going to outstrip the value of offset - for cats.

For bears...it's another issue. It's likely that ilvl is going to trump all here; it's hard to beat the +20 agi/stam you get from the higher ilvl gear, and then you get armor and more sockets too. Especially when you consider crafted things. The real trick is how important that extra cooldown is. I personally view it as very important even if it's minor just because it can combine with barkskin to make it almost as good as shield wall, but it may not be necessary in the fights to come. How you value it depends a lot on your role, how much you use CDs and what the fights are going to be like - and I can only help marginally with the last. So far, I've not seen a lot of requirements of CD use other than perhaps Sindragosa and Festergut to a certain extent. But neither should require 4pT10.

Something that is interesting for me. I just picked up the new ArP trinket and replaced my Greatness card. I'm already ArP soft capped and have 60% passive crit with the trinket on. I saw absolutely zero DPS gains on the target dummy over 5 minute long fights.

My gear level is all 245+.

Is a target dummy a bad way to measure? I was expecting a significant bump to my DPS and saw exactly flat. I'm pushing 5k to 5.1k on a target dummy.

I'm actually not that surprised, Oura. You were already softcapped, so I assume you had Mjolnir or something like it. So you're replacing 90 agi with 155 arpen, which is actually inferior. The only thing you should see a boost on is on a proc from the deathbringer's will, but that's random and sometimes not great.

I wouldn't expect a dramatic increase. What you can do - and what should result in something of an increase - is change your gemming from a mix of agi/arpen to all arpen. That's where the theory states you should see bigger improvement, and that's what Deathbringer's will should allow you to achieve.

Wow - that really is surprising. And this was against the boss level target dummy? I ask because I noticed a substantial difference when I got Mjolnir; about the only thing to do would be to check your proc rate on the needle and see how well it does.

There's also anecdotal evidence that the heroic dummies don't have the same armor that others do. Plus there's the no buffs that you'll normally have.

Oura: you're not likely to see huge dps gains when switching over to an armor pen set on a target dummy. Armor pen scales better with things like haste and AP where you will have a lot more of that in a raid environment. Going solo a straight agi set will almost always destroy armor pen.

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About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.